Hesperophobia: On blaming the Jews
John Derbyshire
From National Review Online
September 13, 2001 5:00 p.m.
Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian
refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the
killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was
responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the
zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took
much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting
on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin,
remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"
I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The
fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists,
several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports
Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said,
or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby
here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed
themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: While I have
not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership
isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close ?
though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold
national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that
the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of
Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable
motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and
interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead
Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were
of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or
abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think these
recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel
American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American
involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is
hesperophobia.
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its
roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and
phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix
can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia is fear or hatred
of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I
committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a
Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means
"Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero
for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated
late-republican Romans.]
Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name
"Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in
Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries,
European civilization ? the West ? is widely hated. Matter of fact,
quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will
know if you spend much time on college campuses.
I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of
Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow,
hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab
hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the
Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs
don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we
humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture.
To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other,
detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got
really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved
industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the
world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures,
that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own
superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese,
millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture
collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed
to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others,
like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma
of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example,
have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government.
For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and
society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David
Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first
encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly,
efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected
civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional
structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished,
shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their
Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs ? the Kuwaitis and
Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being
waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for
them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or
more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so
starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the
end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the
Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are
still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies
about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs
will not have forgotten the Gulf War.
If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and
bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As
Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian
suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious
settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure,
they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.
Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that
Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of
Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the
hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of
the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of
Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that
the Jews were contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem
empires. This is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated
like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters's From Time
Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis.
From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab
land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state.
The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that
land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from
the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be
allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of
without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable
inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.
So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing,
meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S.
politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of
authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for
Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact,
a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New
Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural
solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang
separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much
we are hated in other places.
What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried
through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw
our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against
the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms
manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently
not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so
enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by
American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should
try to repatriate the ones they already have ? lots of luck with
that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other
hesperophobic countries ? China, for example ? are gleefully arming
the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the
profits?
And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our
support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and
the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and
there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since
the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on
our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's
the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools,
and I want no part of it.
Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down,
we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of
barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even
Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the
Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist
interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional
follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget
about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think
straight. You just have to understand that the war between
civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was
fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the
hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you
have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the
thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to
your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice.
What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of
anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism. It was in part
all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of
hesperophobia.